3.06.2006

Suicide

Milan Babic, the leader of rebel Serbs in Croatia and one-time president of the Croatian Serbs in the 1990s, has committed suicide in his cell at a U.N. detention facility where he was serving a 13-year term for war crimes, officials said.

Before sentencing, he apologized to the Croatian people. "I stand before this tribunal with a deep sense of shame and remorse. I allowed myself to participate in the persecution of the worst kind against people only because they were Croats, not Serbs," he said, according to The Associated Press.